Back in 1836 there started a series of Enclosures Acts. These were followed by further acts in 1840 and the General Enclosures Act of 1945. This took the common land from the peasant farmers in Britain and gave it to the Lords, Earls and titled gentry of England.
Under the previous system of common land, each peasant (I would have been one of them) would get a strip of land each year, enough that could be ploughed in a day. On this acre the peasant could grow enough food to feed his family, and in good years a small surplice to sell at market. Along with grazing rights on the common land this system prevented mass starvation and developed a sense of community. No one was likely to get rich, but nor did anyone starve.
While the enclosure of land into the field system we have today helped increase food production, it also meant that millions of people were forced off the land and were no longer able to feed themselves. It was probably the creation of all this unemployment that triggered the Industrial Revolution in Britain.
While the commoners rights system was not the most productive in terms of yield or economic returns, the system was fair to everyone. Further as each peasant farmer got a different strip of land every year, it was in his best interest to keep the land in good order. Also if a peasant were unwell at the time of ploughing, or sowing or harvest, his neighbours helped. Further the peasant was able to carry out his main trade be that thatching or basket making or green woodworking etc.
The Enclosures Acts changed the way that the people in Britain lived and worked. It changed the economy as people now needed to earn money to buy the food they once grew themselves.
Across the planet rich countries are responding to the looming food crisis by using the same principals as happened in Britain in the early 1800s. In countries like the Ukraine, British agricultural businesses are buying or taking long leases on the farm land. In one example a single field that is now producing wheat for a British company was once occupied by one hundred and forty smallholdings where Ukrainian families were growing their own food. While they get some money for the leased land, they now lack the ability to feed themselves without money and they are now unemployed.
The food grown there is not for the Ukrainian people either, so while it generates exports for the country, this undermines the food security for that state. Similar deals are being made by the oil rich gulf states who are buying up wast areas of Africa. This displaces the people who already occupy the land and removes the ability for African Nations to feed themselves.
This is not new as often indigenous people loose their means of providing for themselves when forests are licensed for logging. While their hunter gathering may not generate a measurable economic activity, once their hunting and gathering is stopped the people become the poor and unemployed that become an economic drain on the state.
A further example of this neo colonialism can be found in the way that European industrial fishing vessel have been hovering up the fish from the coast of Africa. This has led to the indigenous fishermen in countries like Senegal unable to catch enough fish to feed their families let alone catch a small surplice to sell and provide the income to educate children or pay for health care.
Had the Enclosure acts not occurred here it is likely that we would have a far more sustainable and diverse countryside here in Britain. The closer that the reasons for poverty and famine are scrutinised the theft of land from the people are frequently at the roots of these events.
Another Giant Leaves Us
8 months ago
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2 comments:
Wood Mouse, the Enclosures started in the reign of Henry VIII. Thomas More wrote about it in UTOPIA:
" Forsooth my lord (quoth I) your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up, and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities. For look in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore dearest wool, there noblemen and gentlemen, yea and certain abbots, holy men no doubt, not contenting themselves with the yearly revenues and profits, that were wont to grow to their forefathers and predecessors of their lands, nor being content that they live in rest and pleasure nothing profiting, yea much annoying the weal public, leave no ground for tillage, they inclose all into pastures; they throw down houses; they pluck down towns, and leave nothing standing, but only the church to be made a sheep-house. And as though you lost no small quantity of grounds by forests, chases, lawns, and parks, those good holy men turn all dwelling-places and all glebeland into desolation and wilderness. Therefore that one covetous and insatiable cormorant and very plague of his native country may compass about and inclose many thousand acres of ground together within one pale or hedge, the husbandmen be thrust out of their own, or else either by cunning and fraud, or by violent oppression they be put besides it, or by wrongs and injuries they be so wearied, that they be compelled to sell all: by one means therefore or by other, either by hook or crook they must needs depart away, poor, silly, wretched souls, men, women, husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, woeful mothers, with their young babes, and their whole household small in substance and much in number, as husbandry requireth many hands. Away they trudge, I say, out of their known and accustomed houses, finding no place to rest in. All their household stuff, which is very little worth, though it might well abide the sale: yet being suddenly thrust out, they be constrained to sell it for thing of nought And when they have wandered abroad till that be spent, what can they then else do but steal, and then justly pardy be hanged, or else go about a-begging."
From Sir Thomas More, Utopia, Maurice Adams, ed.
While enclosure of land was going on long before the enclosures acts, and the earliest evidence of this goes back as early as the eighth century, I was talking specificity about the common land. Just as modern Industrial Agricultural Businesses are taking away the ability of the poorer people to be self sufficient at least, the Nobility in England took the land from the peasants. This changed the economic and environmental structure of the Britain.
But as you rightly point out with your comment, it was happening in centuries past, and your comment is apposite especially in relation to the highland clearances. But that's a whole new posting in itself.
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